It is important for companies to find cost effective ways to manage their digital file storage. Although it may seem that file storage is inexpensive, 80% or more of the total cost of ownership is in managing and administering that storage. Most organizations' need for file storage is growing at 40% to 50% per year, along with the cost to manage that storage. Many companies attempt to manage costs by having various tiers of storage, with different costs for each of these tiers. Along with this, most take the simplistic and costly approach of moving data solely based on when it was last used: “archive everything over x days old” from the higher costs primary storage tiers to the lower cost archiving storage tiers.
But even this approach results in much greater costs than necessary as the data movement is not directly tied to storage policies, applicable rules, and/or the related actions that should be taken when specific user activity occurs. Instead, the archiving software must scan the entire file system week after week or month after month, with little result after the first such scan has been run. (If the data hadn't been used for 2 years at the last scan, the odds that the data have now been used are very small.)
A number of storage software vendors provide solutions that will move or archive data. However all of these technologies rely on the IT Department configuring an archive application to look for files over “x” days old and archive that data. Then in order for the now configured archive solution to do its job, it must scan the entire primary storage device looking for files that meet the configuration profile established by the IT Department. These solutions do not include any mechanism which detects user activity, compares the user activity to a set of rules (storage policies) and then activates the archiving application based on the user's actions and the applicable rules. In and of itself, this means that all of these legacy applications waste system resources (time-consuming scans greatly affect system performance) and are unnecessarily costly. Remember, the goal of archiving isn't to create the archive. It is to manage storage costs. If nothing were to change in primary storage, archiving would never be needed.
Accordingly, what is needed is a cost-effective system and method for policy-based data archiving that is triggered by user activity. By reacting to changes in primary storage as they happen, a much more cost-effective solution can be built. Such solution should be able to interact with any number of currently or future available archiving solutions.